Ship of Secrets Read Online Free PDF

rumor that there was a girl here last night. A few kids saw her with a pocket watch.”
    The girl smashed one of the gophers down, and the machine spit out a whole line of tickets. “I didn’t see her,” she said.
    “Do you know anyone who did?”
    Before Frank could say another word, he heard Joe calling him from somewhere across the room. “Frank! I found them! Frank!”
    Frank darted through the crowd. Joe stood with two girls and a boy. They were leaning against a dancing game. Another boy was stepping ondifferent-colored pads and moving his arms in the air. “Dance to the music,” an electronic voice said over and over again.
    “I saw her last night, around five,” one of the girls said. “She stood out because she had a red scarf around her head.”
    “And sunglasses!” the boy, who had freckles, added. “Don’t forget the sunglasses.”
    Joe scribbled everything down in his notebook. “What color hair did she have?”
    “Brown,” the boy with freckles said.
    “No, she didn’t,” the second girl argued. “She had blond hair. And she wore a long tan coat.”
    “I thought the coat was gray,” the boy said.
    Joe wrote down Hair: brown or blond , then Coat: tan or gray . This was sometimes a problem with witnesses. They disagreed about what they had seen. “Everyone thinks she had a red scarf, though?” Joe asked.
    “Yes!” the three kids shouted at once.
    “And was she carrying the pocket watch when you saw her at five?” Frank asked.
    The second girl, who wore glasses, nodded. “When she came in, I saw the watch in her hand. I thought it was odd, but then I went back to playing pinball. I was in the middle of a game and close to beating my high score.”
    “Did she have it when she left?” Joe asked.
    “Nope. She left only a few minutes later, and it was gone.”
    Frank looked at his brother. “She might’ve hidden it here,” he said.
    “Or given it to someone,” Joe added. He looked at the kids. “Did you see her talking to anyone?”
    “Nope,” the freckled boy said. “But I was busy playing Hungry Alligators.” He pointed to a game by the door. On the screen, alligators were chasing a swimmer down a river.
    “We couldn’t really tell what she looked like,” the girl with glasses added.

    “How old?” Frank asked.
    “Not sure.”
    Frank was about to ask the girl for another description of the girl’s scarf, but then his father walked through the door. He was holding a sheet of paper in his hand.“I’ve been looking for you two!” he called out.
    When he got closer, Frank and Joe saw what it was. It was a picture of the girl the kids had described. “I spent the last hour going through the video footage from the game room,” he said. He pointed to a camera in the corner. “That camera caught our suspect coming in the door with the watch, and leaving without it. Security helped me print these out.”
    Joe looked at the picture. It was blurry, but you could see the pocket watch in her hand as she walked in. Then, in the next photo, her hands were empty. “Is this the girl you saw?” Joe asked the kids they’d been talking to.
    “That’s her! Definitely,” the boy said.
    “And she didn’t talk to anyone while she was here?” Frank asked again.
    “I really don’t think she did,” the girl without the glasses added. “I looked at her a few times. She was always alone.”
    “It seemed like she was looking for something,” the boy said. “She went around to a couple of the games, but she didn’t play any.”
    Mr. Hardy put his hand on his sons’ shoulders. “It’s possible she came here to find a safe spot to put the watch until the ship pulls into the harbor. If she stole it, it might’ve been too risky to carry it around or keep it in her room.”
    “It’s Saturday night, and the game room is closing in fifteen minutes,” Frank said. “The ship pulls into Miami at eight a.m. on Monday morning.”
    “Which means . . . ,” Joe said.